Five Star Billionaire: A Novel by Tash Aw Page A

issues
—were not a welcome addition to her list of considerations. She woke at 6:00 A.M. , had a glass of fruit juice, and then went for a forty-five-minute run on the treadmill. After a breakfast of soy-protein and mixed-berry fruit shake, she would head down to the office and begin to deal with phone calls and emails, before her daily meetings began to force their way into her day. In a city where lunch breaks began religiously at 11:30 A.M ., she rarely had lunch, unless she had arranged a business meeting at a restaurant. Most of the time she would work through midday and simply forget to eat. Afternoons were reserved for visiting her various businesses, spending time chatting to the staff in the stores, gauging their morale and energy levels—the little human touches that made her a good employer. The evenings were nowadaystaken up with entertaining or being entertained, which she neither enjoyed nor disliked. She would get home at eleven and answer any outstanding emails on her BlackBerry while in bed, in the few moments that other people might have spent reading glossy magazines to wind down. At precisely midnight, she would put the light out and swiftly fall asleep, rarely allowing the thoughts of her day to overspill into her sleep.
    Three times a week she went for power yoga at a studio in Xintiandi, never speaking to the other women, who had time to hang around and chat in the corridors. At the end of her practice, when she lay briefly on her mat, blinking at the pistachio-green ceiling, her mind would still be racing, energized by the thought of all the things ahead of her. Empty your mind and be still, her teachers would say, enjoy being in the present: Let go of all that has happened in the past. Do not think about what lies ahead but stay in the stillness of this moment. But this was not possible for her. There was too much for her to do, too many thoughts spinning and clashing in her mind. She needed to look ahead, map out her future, every minute of the day—like a constantly moving ocean creature that would drown if ever it stopped swimming, forward, forward.
    She could never stand emptiness, and stillness was even worse.
    She had a small group of friends, a mixture of local and expat women, with whom she tried to meet up for dinner once every other week—the last semblance of her dwindling social life. They usually met at a Hunan restaurant on the top floor of a Japanese department store on Nanjing Lu, not far from Yinghui’s office. Recently she had begun to notice during these get-togethers that they would casually mention male friends of theirs, all of whom seemed to be single or divorced men in their late thirties and early forties. Discussion of these men seemed innocent enough at first; Yinghui tried to shrug it off as merely catching up on gossip. But after a while she could no longer ignore the fact that her (securely married) friends were taking pity on her, particularly as the men in question were almost exclusively Western—for everyone knew that once a woman was past thirty-five, there was little point in even trying to hook up with a local guy: Westerners were so much more accepting of
age
.
    “Are you trying to matchmake me?” she challenged them jokingly one day as the double-chili fish head arrived. She expected them to be embarrassed by the exposure of their scheming ways, but instead they were up front about it. “Let’s face it,” one of them said, beginning to pluck the meatfrom the fish cheeks with her chopsticks, “you can’t be happy in a place like Shanghai if you’re single. We’re all feminists, blah blah blah, but this is not London or New York, you know, this is China. Without a husband, you won’t be successful in your work. You can’t expect to work the hours you do and come back to an empty apartment. Besides, if you want children, you have to get moving. We know it sounds cruel, but … get real.”
    Yinghui stared at the dull-eyed fish, its eyes opaque and